There's an absolutely terriffic Windows music application called Soundplant; it can assign a sound sample to be triggered by any almost key on the keyboard; essentially, it can turn a computer (laptops, ideally) into a great performance sampler. The webpage is here:

http://www.soundplant.org/

I recently contacted Soundplant creator Marcel Blum concerning the possibility of porting Soundplant to Linux, since I feel that the functionality of the program would complement both XWindows and the text-only interface quite nicely. Blum was very polite and helpful, but informed me that Soundplant was programmed in Macromedia Director. I don't know if Director source can be ported to C or any other Linux-compatible programming language. Does anybody know if this is possible?